West fertilizer blast could have been prevented, experts tell U.S. Senate panel

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The plant hadn’t been inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration since 1985. And an OSHA inspection could have made the difference, Texas A&M safety expert Sam Mannan said, by catching the failure to separate the fertilizer from flammable materials around it.

WASHINGTON — Even without new regulations, April’s deadly fertilizer blast in Texas could have been averted, chemical safety experts told a Senate committee Thursday.

The dangers of storing explosive material in wooden containers and buildings are well known. Various fire codes and industry standards call for sprinklers. Proximity to homes and schools added to the risk.

And 11 years have passed since the federal agency that investigates industrial accidents urged the Environmental Protection Agency to add ammonium nitrate — the substance that detonated in West — to a list of hazards requiring a local emergency plan.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, called adoption of that “critical safeguard” long overdue.

In a series of testy exchanges with the EPA’s top safety official, she accused the agency of showing an appalling “lack of urgency.” The California Democrat demanded that it add the widely used fertilizer material to its hazard list within two weeks.

“Recommendations were made a long time ago, and nothing is happening,” said Boxer, D-Calif. “We are going to work with you — and, if we have to, against you — to make sure this happens.”

Thursday’s 90-minute hearing was Congress’ first look at the April 17 blast, which registered as a small earthquake, left a 10-foot-deep crater, killed 15 people and destroyed a section of the small Central Texas town.

The chairman of the federal Chemical Safety Board, Rafael Moure-Eraso, identified a “patchwork” of federal, state and local regulations whose many shortcomings failed to stop the detonation of roughly 30 tons of ammonium nitrate.

The plant hadn’t been inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration since 1985. And an OSHA inspection alone could have made the difference, Texas A&M safety expert Sam Mannan testified, because regulations requiring separation between ammonium nitrate and potential ignition sources would have helped.

The material should be kept within firewalls rated to halt the spread of flames for an hour, he said. That would have been plenty of time for firefighters to tamp down the blaze that set off the blast, and diligent inspections would have caught that such walls weren’t present.

“Most facilities don’t follow the standard,” Mannan, director of A&M’s Process Safety Center, told the committee, but “if they had followed that, my guess is the probability of this incident would have been almost none.”

He urged Congress to order an exhaustive nationwide risk study. He said it should include not only facilities’ inventories but also a review of the regulations and agencies that should be dealing with them.

No OSHA officials testified Thursday. Asked afterward about the assertions, the agency said that unless it receives a complaint, it only inspects chemical facilities that report more than a threshold level of hazardous material to the EPA.

The West facility hadn’t done that, so it wasn’t on OSHA’s targeted inspection list.

“OSHA’s investigation of the West Fertilizer plant explosion is still an open and ongoing case,” said Diana Petterson, spokeswoman for its parent agency, the U.S. Department of Labor.

Moure-Eraso lauded the industry’s trade group, the Fertilizer Institute, for seeking to improve safety. The group’s representative said separately that regardless of the regulations in place, keeping a potentially explosive chemical in flammable buildings and bins is a bad idea.

“When you see an accident like that, you kind of stop and regroup and say, ‘OK, we’ve got to go back, because we’ve got some people in our industry that haven’t solved the basic storage and handling requirements for our products,’ ” Ford West, president of the institute, said in an interview. “Get your fire department in, make sure they understand what you have there.”

For much of the hearing, Boxer clashed with the EPA official in charge of safety at chemical plants, Barry Breen. He repeatedly ducked her demands for an explanation of why the agency hasn’t implemented the 2002 safety board recommendation that ammonium nitrate needs more oversight.

Breen noted that his agency warned in December 1997 that an ammonium nitrate fire in an enclosed space could lead to an explosion.

Hours later, EPA sought to mitigate the damage, saying in a written statement that it “shares concerns raised by Sen. Boxer that it is imperative that chemical plant risks be reduced to the greatest extent possible to avoid tragedies” like the one in West.

At one point, Boxer expressed amazement that risk assessments in West were years out of date, failing to reflect significant development around the plant, which opened in 1961.

The detonation occurred 20 minutes after the West Volunteer Fire Department got its first notification about the fire. The lack of a sprinkler system was a big problem, Moure-Eraso said. By the time firefighters arrived, “the fire was intense and out of control.”

He noted that in Europe, limestone (calcium carbonate) is routinely combined with ammonium nitrate to make a fertilizer that is far harder to detonate.

One relative of a West victim attended the hearing: Timothy White, a chemist for an Indianapolis drug maker, whose brother-in-law, Kevin Sanders of Eddy, was among the emergency responders killed in the blast.

“A hundred things should have happened differently,” White said, summing up the lessons aired. “No one had to get hurt.”

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